Underhanded

Martin McDonagh’s slap in the face.

I don’t know a single self-respecting black actor who wouldn’t feel shame and fury while sitting through Martin McDonagh’s new play, “A Behanding in Spokane” (directed by John Crowley, at the Gerald Schoenfeld). Nor do I know one who would have the luxury of turning the show down, once the inevitable tours and revivals get under way. The play is engineered for success, and McDonagh’s stereotypical view of black maleness is a significant part of that engineering. Still, one wonders how compromised the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Mackie must feel, playing Toby, a black prole whose misadventures are central to this four-character show. Mackie recently attracted notice for his portrayal of a bomb-squad sergeant in Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war movie “The Hurt Locker.” But even in that role he was drawing on a paradigm—Lou Gossett, Jr.,’s 1982 portrayal of a drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The sad fact is that, in order to cross over, most black actors of Mackie’s generation must act black before they’re allowed to act human.

Since McDonagh’s first play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” was staged on Broadway, in 1998, American audiences have been struck by his universality, despite the fact that Ireland is home to most of his characters. (McDonagh was born in London in 1970 to Irish parents.) Instead of catering to the cliché of the lovable, maudlin Irish—the Celtic counterpart to America’s black mammy and Uncle Remus—McDonagh set out to subvert it. He seemed to scrape his sentences off the cruddy cobblestones of his parents’ bleak, rural West of Ireland. There he found not only his theme—home as the breeding ground of a malignancy known as family—but his tone, which is bitterly comedic. In McDonagh’s 1997 play, “The Lonesome West,” two brothers, Coleman and Valene, argue over who has been drinking whose poteen; they’re more concerned about that, really, than they are about the fact that Coleman has killed their father. “The Lonesome West” is said to have been inspired by Sam Shepard’s “True West,” another play about sibling rivalry and the myths of masculinity, but one hears less Shepard in McDonagh than J. M. Synge, the nineteenth-century Irish playwright, whose Gaelic rhythms, wild narratives, and unimpeachable sense of structure clearly left their mark on his disciple. Synge’s unfinished last play, “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” opens with a conversation between two women (“She hasn’t come yet, is it, and it falling to the night?” “She has not. . . . It’s dark with the clouds coming from the west and south, but it isn’t later than the common”) who could just as easily be the aging sisters whose banter begins McDonagh’s 1996 play, “The Cripple of Inishmaan”:

KATE: Is Billy not yet home?

EILEEN: Not yet is Billy home.

KATE: I do worry awful about Billy when he’s late returning home.

EILEEN: I banged me arm on a can of peas worrying about Cripple Billy.

KATE: Was it your bad arm?

EILEEN: No, it was me other arm. . . .

KATE: Now you have two bad arms.

EILEEN: Well, I have one bad arm and one arm with a knock.

KATE: The knock will go away.

EILEEN: The knock will go away.

KATE: And you’ll be left with the one bad arm.

EILEEN: The one bad arm will never go away.

By the time McDonagh’s “The Pillowman,” premièred on Broadway, in 2005, he had taken his penchant for setting a play’s tone in its first moments to a whole new level. “Pillowman” marries Synge to Kafka, with Harold Pinter as a witness. In the opening scene, a man and his mentally handicapped brother are being held as suspects in the murders of local children. But that bit of gruesomeness is just a pretext. The play’s brilliance lies in what comes next: a series of tales about the interchangeability of familial love and abuse, and our need for stories to get us through the hall of mirrors that we call a self, or a sibling.

After “Pillowman,” McDonagh wrote and directed two films. (The screenplay for his movie “In Bruges” was nominated for an Oscar in 2008.) I don’t know how much his filmmaking influenced “A Behanding in Spokane,” but the play suffers from the kind of reductive, by-the-numbers structure that often makes screenplays dull to read. And yet, in spite of its purposeful simplicity, “A Behanding” isn’t the least bit palatable; it’s vile, particularly in its repeated use of the word “nigger.” As the play begins, the theatre’s ratty-looking curtain is drawn, not raised, thereby alerting us both to the production’s old-fashioned style (footlights, some of them broken, line the front of the stage) and to our own voyeurism: we’re peeking through the window of a large, dark room in a crummy hotel where Carmichael (Christopher Walken), a drifter and a sociopath, has holed up. He sits on the edge of his bed. A muffled cry comes from the closet. Annoyed, Carmichael walks over to the wardrobe and fires a gun into it. Then he phones his mother, and it’s at this point that we know we’re not grateful for Walken’s performance. His Carmichael isn’t a character; he’s Christopher Walken—the same Walken who has hosted “Saturday Night Live” and appeared in countless movies—with his intriguing (and then not) halting speech patterns and his sinister aesthetic.

There is a knock at the door. Enter Mervyn (Sam Rockwell), a desk captain at the hotel, who wants to know if Carmichael heard a gunshot. Carmichael says no. Mervyn presses him. What happened to the black boy and the white girl who followed him up to the room? They left by the fire escape, Carmichael claims. Another knock. The girl, Marilyn (the awkward Zoe Kazan), enters. Skinny, with streaked blond hair, and in pencil-legged acid-wash jeans, she’s a bundle of nerves and accusations. As Mervyn exits, Marilyn gets down to business. She has Carmichael’s missing hand and she wants her boyfriend, Toby, out of the closet. Once Toby is free, all he and Marilyn ask is that Carmichael pay them the five hundred bucks he promised in exchange for the hand. But, first, Carmichael insists on telling the story of how he lost his appendage. When he was a kid in Spokane, Washington, a bunch of hooligans held his arm to a railroad track and watched as a train ran over it. They left, waving at him with his severed hand, which he has been searching for ever since. His leads brought him to this room. Now Marilyn has given him the wrong hand, a dark-skinned hand, and he flies into a rage:

CARMICHAEL: To be presented with the hand that got cut offa some colored fella when what I was asking for was the hand that got cut offa me, like I’m not supposed to even notice. Y’know, seriously, WHAT . . . THEFUCK . . . AMI . . . SUPPOSED TO DO . . . WITH THIS!!!

MARILYN: That is not a colored man’s hand. That is your hand which has just gone dark over time.

CARMICHAEL: . . . Maybe I haven’t made myself clear. What you’ve gone and done is, you’ve brought me the hand off a nigger. (To Toby) You, of all people, should know better. The hand off of one of your own people, like no one’s supposed to even notice.

What one does notice throughout this exchange is Mackie’s behavior. He performs as though he were Stepin Fetchit in a room full of bickering ghosts. Toby’s characterization is as offensive as the language used to describe him. While Carmichael’s “nigger” talk could be put down to an attempt of McDonagh’s to expose the nastiness of a segment of the population—many writers have used ugly language to paint an honest portrait of racism in this country—the caricature he presents in Toby, the young black male as shucking, jiving thief, can’t be excused on those grounds, or by the slick professionalism that coats the play’s intellectual decay. McDonagh adds gag after gag to the show, as if he believed that comedy could cover up the real horror at its core: the fact that blackness is, for him, a Broadway prop, an easy way of establishing a hierarchy. Like any smart immigrant, McDonagh knows that by going after Toby’s otherness he becomes less of an outsider himself. This is how many people, certainly in the Republic’s past, have first defined themselves as Americans. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.